


reifications, render slowly

by agivise



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: (an amuse-bouche of homicide really), Blood and Gore, Character Study, M/M, Pre-Canon, Unreliable Narrator, and only a little bit of homicide, feat. kepler being a bitch, jacobi ignoring his feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-20 22:59:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14903792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agivise/pseuds/agivise
Summary: you reach for the drawer on your left instead, brushing aside a handful of broken pens, three crumpled receipts, and fish-gutting knife, before finally settling on a recently-swiped clay garrote, which you hold delicately in your hands, marveling at the sharpness of the wire, and how much more interesting it would look strung around some poor bastard’s un-anticipating throat, cutting deep through layers of red until there’s nothing left but a quiet, strangled gurgling in the air.but there is no thief or killer strolling through your door, only kepler, who is both a thief and killer and yet somehow so transcendent of those titles that he has become something else entirely, another breed, and you worship his every awful move he makes.(or, kepler gets hurt, and jacobi lends a hand.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> god this got a lot longer than i was expecting it to and it's not even done  
> hey have you noticed how i procrastinate writing by working on other writing? how healthy. but honestly i couldn't resist an excuse to write more from jacobi's perspective because it's incredibly fun
> 
> warnings for the blood and gore which has apparently become standard in my writing, as well as some mild sexual content and violence
> 
> title stolen from vacation by still woozy, which is one of today's song recs, the other being holy toledo by vundabar because GOD what a good song

i.

you’re half-asleep on your kitchen island when he picks the deadbolt on your front door and cuts through the chain lock with the chipped wirecutter on his swiss army knife.

at first, you don’t know it’s him. you assume, in your exhaustion-addled brain, that it is some sort of burglar, or some delusional psychopath planning on kidnapping you and feeding your remains to his dogs, and you’ve had a long enough night doing cutter’s bullshit paper-pushing to be aching for a good clean fight. you’ve got an itchy trigger finger and, inches from the back of your neck, a whole set of beautiful kitchen knives — an old birthday gift from maxwell — that you’ve been dying to try out on something a bit more visceral than fresh tuna steaks or fillets of cold red meat.

the black granite below your head is cool and inviting, an alluring contrast to the inescapable heat of summer, but your interest is piqued, and you force yourself to sit upright quickly, holding your weight on steady arms as you blink yourself back into proper consciousness. the room is dark, hazed over with a pale blue glow from the open screen of your laptop, stacked precariously on top of a tower of files, its fans whirring fuzzily to keep it from overheating in your negligence. there’s a pretty little silenced pistol stashed in the drawer nearest to your right hand. you already have one too many noise complaints from your neighbours, though, and apartment hunting is the _last_ thing you want to do right about now, so you’d rather not risk an unnecessary gunshot, muffled or not.

you reach for the drawer on your left instead, brushing aside a handful of broken pens, three crumpled receipts, and fish-gutting knife, before finally settling on a recently-swiped clay garrote, which you hold delicately in your hands, marveling at the sharpness of the wire, and how much more interesting it would look strung around some poor bastard’s un-anticipating throat, cutting deep through layers of red until there’s nothing left but a quiet, strangled gurgling in the air.

but there is no thief or killer strolling through your door, only kepler, who is both a thief and killer and yet somehow so transcendent of those titles that he has become something else entirely, another breed, and you worship his every awful move he makes.

you move to take a sip of your long-abandoned flat coke, unimpressed by his dramatic entrance, and glance him over. you don’t have your glasses on, but you can see him well enough, and you drop the garrote back onto the countertop. it’s definitely him. he’s in rough shape, but his expression and posture and porcelain-sharp eyes are as composed as ever, very nearly distracting you from the oil slick of blood pouring from the massive sharp force trauma to his right shoulder.

 _go to a fucking hospital, moron,_ you want to shout at him, but instead, you just set down your glass and say, “you know, you really should just ask me for a key. or try knocking, sir.”

“but breaking and entering, mr. jacobi, is a great deal more fun. you know that as well as i do,” he retorts, and only now, hearing the well-masked strain in his voice, do you become truly concerned.

he has been shot several times throughout his life.

(you have been by his side through much of it, but not a majority. so far from a majority. you suspect that neither of you will live nearly long enough for you to have been present for more than half of his life, but here’s to hoping.)

ultimately, when kepler is shot, he follows a remarkably consistent pattern of three things. he’s a stubborn bitch about it — absolutely refuses to acknowledge the pain, rarely doing much more than flinching and hissing through his teeth when he thinks you aren’t paying attention. (you are always paying attention.) he finds someone a great deal more competent than you to clean, pack, and bandage the wound for him. (you are, in essence, whatever the opposite of a medical doctor is.) and, all the while, he tells one of his stories. one of his long-winded, corybantic stories, one which you would swear to god was entirely fabricated if you didn’t know the man so very well. it is, more often than not, not a big deal. he doesn’t make a fuss every time he gets shot. if he did, it’d be a lot harder for him to get his job done.

this, however, is not a gunshot wound. from the looks of it, he’s been stabbed. possibly more than once. it’s quite rarely that he gets stabbed. it’s quite rarely that anyone gets close enough to stab him, really. that’s more your speed. you’ve had to stitch up a minor gash or two on your own torso once or twice, but not on him.

“oh, _christ,_ ” you hiss, and move quickly to his side, offering your arm to him to ensure that he doesn’t fall. or, at the very least, you attempt to, before he ungratefully pushes you away and trudges shakily over to your drawers, rooting through them with one hand while the other crutches his weight.

you leave your kitchen to grab some painkillers and your suture kit from your medicine cabinet, slipping your glasses back on in the process, and by the time you return, he looks about eight seconds from keeling over into a puddle of his own blood which he has so _elegantly_ spilled onto your nice white rug.

“i want a fucking raise,” you mumble, and approach him cautiously, the way you might have once approached a feral dog with a handful of offal. he _is_ quite like a feral dog, really, if feral dogs were absolute deliberate fucking bastards.

he glares at you, leaning his back against your wall, no doubt with the sole intent of permanently staining it with the broadest possible smear of the crisp red-black of his blood. no amount of scrubbing will ever get rid of _that._

“if you —” he shivers slightly, grazing his left fingers across your ribs, digging his nails into your intercostals, in what you can only assume is a tremendously failed attempt to push you down. you blanche. this is the least composed you have ever seen him, and you have seen him wasted, poisoned, and absolutely beat to hell. it fills you with dread and fascination and a sickening streak of joy. “if you get snarky with me, mr. jacobi, i promise —” his lungs catch on the inhale, and he grinds his teeth, right arm hanging limply against his form. “i promise you, i will not _hesitate_ to sell your bones to whale tooth carvers, wholesale. how much do you value your limbs, mr. jacobi? i’m sure i could — sure i could fetch a pretty penny for them on ebay.”

his threats, while always hyperbolized, are never entirely disingenuous, and you decide that maybe you should put at least a little effort into acting like the pliant, subordinate piece of shit that you both know you are, lest he finally decides to fire you, finally decides that you’re a lost cause after all. you don’t think you’d survive that. then again, you don’t think you’ll survive _him,_ either.

you try again to offer him a hand, and he accepts it this time, digging his nails deep into the back of your wrist as he leans forward against you, rests his head on your shoulder, and _god,_ you don’t know what you’re gonna do with him, and you don’t know what you’d do without him, and every inch of your skeleton is aching with conflict and fire and every inch of your skin is creeping with the heat of the room and his cold cold blood.

you nudge yourself backward a bit and try to get him to lift his head so you can see the wound better, but he’s apparently either too pained or too stubborn or too wrought with vertigo to do much of anything except to pry the suture kit from your hands and sway worryingly. his torn shirt and his blood are making too much of a mess for you to see the extent of the damage, though, so you give him a final concerned glance before telling him to put pressure on the wound, grabbing a towel from your bathroom, and running it under some cool water.

once you return again, he’s barely upright, slowly sinking down the wall, dry-swallowing a suspiciously large palmful of pills and streaking more blood along the nice white paint the whole way down. your landlord is going to fucking eviscerate you, if kepler doesn’t first.

“you know, if you stopped trying to be so damned stubborn and actually sat down, you’d be a hell of a lot less dizzy. and less tired,” you grumble. “take your shirt off.”

“i am — your superior,” he bites out slowly, between labored breaths, “and i’m sure as _hell —_ not going to take orders — from _you._ ”

“fine, then. bleed to death, _sir,_ ” you say oh-so-pleasantly, and kick lightly at his ankles. “at least kneel, before you pass out on my living room floor.”

he growls at you, but sinks to his knees regardless, and you savor the image of him in such an _accommodating_ position for an impossibly brief, impossibly long moment before you kneel, too, your hands grazing his neck as you search blindly for the top button on his collar, his breath hot on your skin.

“is this okay?” you ask, and he smirks his coy little bullshit smirk at the entendre, the damned snake, and hands you his swiss army knife, open to the scissors, which is at this point so caked with his blood that it spills into your palms and sinks into the spaces at the edges of your nails.

“if you don’t mind, mr. jacobi, this will make the process — a great deal faster. i would greatly prefer to get myself sewn up _before_ i am entirely exsanguinated.” he takes his hand away from the wound, sticky strands of blood clutching to his fingers, and tries to shrug his injured shoulder, but his quiet, stifled groan is enough to tell you just how successful that attempt is. with the removal of pressure, it begins to bleed again, not a great deal, but enough to worry you. “and, i suspect, a great deal less — of a strain on my arm.”

you nod silently and begin to cut the stained fabric from his body, peeling it away from where is has adhered and dried to his skin, cautious as you draw closer to the wound. his body is soaked in red. he wears the blood like a pall.

undressing him feels like sacrilege. especially with the sound of pained humming low in his throat, his free hand leaving bruises on your waist, the smell of metal and salt hot on his skin —

you pull away from him and take the towel and suture kit from where they have been abandoned on the floor. “can you stand?” you ask with your arm outstretched, an offering, and he scoffs, headstrong as ever, and stands without your help. he’s shaky, though, no matter how desperately he tries to hide it, and when you pretend to take his hand you pull _yourself_ up, you hold onto it, guiding him over to your sofa. you sit with on the floor with your back against it, patting the space between your knees. “c’mere,” you call up to him, and as out of it as he is, he still manages to raise his brows in amusement.

he lowers himself down, sitting between your legs with his back to you, and while you can’t see his face, you know damn well that he’s absolutely got that fucking _smirk_ on it. “i’m fairly certain my hair is too short to braid,” he quips.

“ha, ha,” you deadpan. “i want to clean and stitch the top of the wound first, so it stops spilling more blood across the rest of it and obscuring where i need to put the needle. this gives me a better angle.”

you tilt his head gently to the left and help him press the damp towel against the cut. he doesn’t make a sound. you worry he may be biting his own tongue.

“don’t be stupid, major. pretending you aren’t suffering from a massive stab wound to the trapezius isn’t gonna do anyone any good,” you remind him. he laughs a bit in response, a good sign, and you flick on the lamp nearest to you to give yourself a clearer view of what’s happened. “here, take the towel, keep pressure on the front of the cut.”

it’s a fucking mess, is what it is.

if it had been a cleaner cut, this would be a much easier task. but whatever knife was used, it didn’t cut cleanly through the tissue. it dragged a jagged, flayed line from the top of his shoulder down nearly to his collarbone.

“ _christ,_ kepler, did they twist the fucking knife after stabbing it into you?” the thread in your hand is silk, you note. catgut would dissolve on its own. silk won’t. you’ll have to cut it back out of him yourself, once the injury heals.

“you should see the other guy,” he jokes through gritted teeth. “i don’t seem to recall leaving him with any teeth. or a pulse.”

you take the forceps in your left hand, the needle holder in your right, and get to work.

stitching a wound closed is much easier when it’s not your own, it seems.

you can safely assume that he’s still in a remarkable amount of pain from the prickly, nervous movements of his hands, but he’s sitting still and not fighting you too much on your constant verbal insubordination, so you count it as a win for both of you — even if you do still feel the weight of an albatross around your throat, having failed so tremendously at protecting him in the first place. eventually, though, he begins to lean too far back against you in his exhaustion, making your task one hell of a lot harder to do properly without accidentally stabbing him.

you flick his ear. “stay conscious or i’ll start jabbing you intentionally.”

“please remind me why can’t i be asleep for this.”

“because if you pass out, there will be nothing left preventing my moral compass from dragging your sorry ass to the hospital, against your direct orders or not.” _because he’s getting precariously close to risking shock without a transfusion, and his fatigue is scaring the hell out of you._

he hums, unimpressed.

“tell me a story, sir,” you say, desperate to distract one of you. you’re just not sure who.

“a story in which you were present? or one you were absent for?”

“surprise me.”

he sighs deeply, almost messing up the bite of your needle. “do you — _ouch_ — do you remember florence?”

you shade your eyes for a second in mildly guilty remembrance, which you are remarkably glad he does not see you do. “the gala at the uffizi. yes, i remember.”

“you and maxwell were tasked with pretending to be husband and wife. a simple ruse. you both fucked it up spectacularly.”

you smile a bit. “we weren’t _that_ bad of actors.”

“i introduced you, as husband and wife, to the curator. maxwell, before the words even left my mouth, fist-bumped you and then broke down laughing — and _you,_ you rolled your eyes and left to grab champagne, _completely_ ignoring your directive. then, if i recall correctly, you immediately proceeded to get shitfaced and hide in the corner for the rest of the night. you might as well have shot the man right then and there, you blew your cover so badly.”

“she’s, like, a sister to me! it was a bad plan from the start, and we all knew it, and we did it anyways. god, that mission was a _disaster_.” it really was. you wonder why he chose to talk about this one, this mission, out of all the wild stories he has in that head of his. maybe it’s just an easy target. fish in a barrel.

“surprisingly, mr. jacobi, you and maxwell did not make the _greatest_ mess of the mission.”

“and, what, you _did?”_

“do you remember _my_ task for that night, mr. jacobi?”

your fingers trip over themselves, and you nearly drop the needle holder before correcting your grip and fixing the suture. “i — uh, yes. you were supposed to… to, uh, _seduce_ one of the exhibit preparators. get some info on an old painting, something like that.” you frown. “wait, didn’t that night end with me setting off some firecrackers in the storage closet as a distraction? so maxwell could hack their system for that _same_ information? why did we need to resort to _that_ on a stealth mission? you could’ve just gotten it from the exhibit preparator.”

he laughs stiffly as you tie off the final stitch in that row and set the suture kit to the side.

“did i ever tell you about the time i mistakenly called the exhibit preparator i was flirting with _your_ name?”

your breath hitches in your chest, and you trace your fingers along the line of his vertebrae, an elegant curve of muscle and sinew and bone. “oh.”

“it was july, jacobi, and you wouldn’t stop grumbling about the heat, even after the sun had fallen. it was precisely the second time i had ever obliged you to wear a suit, and you still managed to complain about how ‘often’ i governed your outfits, as if your wearing a ratty tee shirt and sweatpants to a black tie event would have possibly been reasonable.”

“black tie _optional,_ ” you correct.

“yes, yes, black tie _optional_. i even let you wear all black for your suit and shirt, as classless as look as it was,” he recalls, and you smile. “dr. maxwell was off schmoozing some guards, but you were already champagne-tipsy and bored, and with the blueprints already compiled beforehand, you hadn’t had any particular charges at that moment in time. but you were enjoying being relatively alone, at least, and i was watching you from across one of the halls as you stared out at a pair of birds fighting over a piece of cheese, which you no doubt had given to them intentionally. a whole museum full of high society and priceless artifacts, and you were looking at the pigeons.”

“i’m more of a performance art kind of guy,” you joke, and you drag your thumb across his shoulder blade. he shivers. “what’s your point?”

“i remember being oh-so confused as to why you, a perfectly reasonable man, would have any desire to look at anything other than the art. it seemed so absurd to me, to do such a thing. and do you know what i noticed? what do _you_ think i noticed? take a gander, mr. jacobi.”

you hum in reply, not wanting to feed into his criticism of you.

“i _noticed_ , mr. jacobi, that the whole time, i had been watching you. the most beautiful gallery in all of italy, and i was looking at you.”

(you wonder if he hears the pained hitch in your breath as he he says this. if he hears, he doesn’t point it out to you, just lets it sit at the back of your mind, gnawing at you — his favorite form of torture.)

“but i had a task at hand,” he continues, “and i didn’t intend on ruining that task because i was distracted. so i went back, and i spoke with the the exhibit preparator. she had on a black satin gown, and she had such dark eyes, almost like yours, mr. jacobi, but not nearly as sharp. and to make a long story short — do you know what i called her? go on and guess.”

“you called her jacobi.”

“no,” he says simply. “i called her daniel.”

god.

_god._

he pauses for a beat, rolling his maimed shoulder slightly, the way a leopard might move when preparing to pounce. “it was not my most graceful moment.”

(you beg to differ.)

he’s forgotten to keep pressure on the front of the wound, allowing it to bleed again slightly, so you guide his hand back with yours, and just sit there for a while, your arms wrapped around him, his back to your chest, hands held against each other in obeisance, coated in a saccharine, gleaming red. you press your forehead against the back of his blood-slicked neck, a sickening moment of vulnerability for both of you, though it gives the two of you a short and much-needed respite. your fingers dance across the back of his, soft against his wrist, tapping absently. he is a melody you can’t quite figure out.

“the — ah, sir?” you say after a too-long moment of silence. you are still somewhat distracted trying to feel for the pulsing of his arteries under your fingertips. it’s mesmerizing.

“yes, mr. jacobi?”

“could you face towards me, please? there are a few more stitches i’d like to finish, closer to your collarbone.”

he nods slightly and turns his body towards you, and you are once again reminded of the sheer amount of red red blood and the sharpness of his teeth and how his skin feels like glass and how tragically, gravely, _disastrously_ much you worship him.

you pick your tools back up.

 _everything i have i owe to you,_ you want to say, as you delicately dig the needle and silk back through his bloodied skin, a ceremony, a communion. virtuous and pitiful. _everything i am, i owe to you._

“stay with me forever,” you say instead, not letting him have the satisfaction of knowing your thought process, not letting him have the satisfaction of context, of understanding, of communication. he may grace you with some sort of reply, but you are not listening, only observing, eyes locked on your own hummingbird hands and the hollows of his collarbones like your life depends on it.

he sits patiently, watching you with intent, a bird of prey, as you tie off the last suture in silence and release the tools from your hands. you’ve finally managed to stop him from losing any more blood. the sutures are perfect. he remains conscious, for now. he will be fine. he always is.

his hands move to cover yours, streaking more maroon across the backs of your wrists, across the bruises he left there. it’s terrifyingly intimate.

“you’ve lost a lot of fluids. i’m — i should grab you a glass of water,” you suggest hurriedly, and he’s still staring at you, still enraptured, still not replying, and as much of a wonder that it is for him to be so silent, it’s too much. _so_ much. too damn close. you feel _remarkably_ uninhibited, and you’re gonna do something really _fucking_ stupid if you don’t get yourself far, far away from him very, _very_ soon.

you make a half-hearted attempt to stand, to move away, but his fingers lock tighter onto your wrists, pulling you back onto the floor, back to _him_ , both of you coated in a veneer of slick blood, cool and dark like liquid iron on your skin. his breath is still shallow, still quickened, and you passively note that you’re breathing just as rapidly. his hand moves to your cheek. you lean reflexively into his touch. his skin is like shark’s scales.

“say it again,” he says, low and slow and tantalizingly sweet, and you swear to god he can feel your pulse racing dizzily beneath his fingertips. you’re a marble statue in his hands. and he, he is everything.

“say _what_ again, sir?” you ask with a plaster of faux-innocence over your voice. you know damn well what he wants you to repeat. you know damn well how badly he wants you to repeat it.

“say. it. again.” he leans in close, head tilted, breath hot on your neck, and you know you can no longer hold your composure. your self-control is slipping, and fast.

but you will not let him win. you stay silent. you say nothing.

he brushes his thumb across your bottom lip, staining you with the taste of his blood, and you want nothing more than to _break_ , to claw and scratch and reign victorious, to languish in his rage, to see past the gunpowder and smoke and _see_ him, really _see_ him, without his façade hiding him away from _you_ , from the _world._

(as if there’s any difference between the two, the way he’s looking at you now.)

you are suddenly reminded of the time years ago when you had a 3 a.m. flight, and you managed to scrounge up one of the last window seats, a row or two in front of the wing. you remember how untrusting you used to be of flying — particularly ironic, isn’t it, airforce boy? you _distinctly_ remember the way it scared the living hell out of you, even if that fear has entirely dissipated by now. but you also remember how the city lights below you looked like snuffed orange cinders, still flickering with human heat, and how cold the glass was, and how you leaned against the window so desperately intoxicated with the view — fighting off the ache of sleep, if only because you were so fucking terrified and it was so fucking beautiful.

you are reminded of this because it is exactly the way you are leaning into kepler now.

“sir,” you mumble, and he shifts his head downwards, painting the barely-exposed dip between your collarbones with the ire of his breath. harsh, so harsh, like a carbon steel knife on a soft, scarred cutting board.

his hands — christ, his hands, draped with red like lace, like wine. you look like a murder scene beside him, strung with his gore, a sculpture of his own making. he must love it. he was always so sweet on revenge tragedies.

“kepler,” you say, and your voice is strained and impossibly fond. he grazes his teeth across your throat with a soft sigh. (your nails dig into his spine. it’s all you can do to keep from gasping.)

his hands drift to your hips and he presses his forehead against yours, head tilted, flakes of dried blood caught in his hair scuffing lightly against your face. “warren,” you whisper as you rake your fingers across the back of his neck in a desperate attempt to pull him closer, as if such a thing is even possible, is even feasible. _“warren,”_ and he kisses you, so sweetly, so gently, so unlike him, and every inch of your skin is on fire.

you respond with the approximate tranquility of a landslide.

he tastes like an electrical fire smells. you suddenly become quite certain he can sense the flavor of his own slick, sticky blood on your lips, metallic and ringing, and you want to kiss him till you can taste _yourself_ in _him_ , something so definitively _you_ , something dark and needy and volatile.

he offers you a surprised little noise, a hum, maybe, or a whimper, when your teeth clash against his, when you bite faint bruises into his lips, when you pull yourself flush against him, ever cautious of his shoulder, as if you two could occupy the same space, breathe the same air. his hands roam so delicately, so musically, and you are determined to prove to him that you are not as fucking _fragile_ as he is treating you, if you can only first convince yourself that this is all very, very real, not one of his tricks, not some old memory or dream. but his mouth drifts to your jaw, to your neck, your right hand to the small of his back and your left so carefully to the stitches at his collarbone, and _no, yes, this is definitely real._

when he eventually pulls away from you, so so slightly, you are shaking, and although you’ve never in your damn life seen him look even a _bit_ remorseful, the expression on his face certainly resembles something so faintly akin to it. _monster’s guilt_. you know the feeling well. it’s the ‘nobody’s-fault-but-still-mine’ feeling. your default emotion.

“hey,” you whisper into his neck.

“hi,” he says back, and wraps his arms around you in a strange sort of embrace, moving the two of you into a more sustainable position, with his back against the base of the couch and you pulled forward onto his lap. his breath is steady now, a pleasant rhythm, like rainfall.

you stop shaking, the adrenaline finally all worn off, and sink into his listless grip. you wonder, briefly, if he is staying awake deliberately, only to prove a point to the universe. you understand the vertigo of blood loss all too well. the human body doesn’t suffer rebellion kindly. but he is kepler, and kepler does not bow to the laws of physiology — only to you, and only on good days.

against all odds, you fall asleep before him.

\---


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter two of two! thank you guys _so_ much for all the love and support, it never ceases to make me smile, and i'm running out of words to express my gratitude  <3
> 
> mild warnings for blood and violence because it's a fic by me what were you expecting
> 
> today's song recs: confetti by 1,2,3 and your sufferin' heart by born ruffians

ii.

you, warren, are a man of simple pleasures.

you are a man of hand-cut ice cubes and glass paperweights and pleasantly rainy days. you may indulge every once in a while — an exorbitant sterling wristwatch here, a collector’s fine aged wine there — but there’s something about consistent, charming simplicities that just feels right below your fingertips, under your teeth, at the base of your often-busied mind.

now, daniel jacobi is far from a simple pleasure. in fact, he is one of the most tremendously complicated men you have ever known. he is as much an integral piece of you as is your own right hand. and you quite _like_ your right hand. it lets you play guitar and prepare beignet and hold a knife. mister jacobi is a lot like that hand. losing him wouldn’t kill you, but it just might make you wish it did.

but he isn’t all sunshine and rainbows and twenty-four karat gold. daniel jacobi is _not_ a decadence by any means. he ain’t some guilty pleasure for you to savour slowly, all chopped up into little pieces and presented on pretty silver platters. he is an acquired taste. he is burnt, lukewarm hotel room coffee, the kind that you swore to hell and back you’d never be keen on, until you woke up one day and had a proper dark brew and it just didn’t sit right on your tongue like the cheap stuff did. the kind you need in your mug each morning like you need air.

you’ve had the pleasure of watching him sleep pretty damn often. most sleeping people have a certain vulnerability to them which amuses you deeply. their walls are all torn down. they can’t hide who they really are, what they’re really like, when they’re asleep. this rarely makes a difference in your observation of people, in all honesty. you have the incredibly useful talent of being able to see right past people’s walls whether or not they’re actively keeping them up.

y’all have a habit of putting on fake little viceroy smiles to get your way in the world, but despite it all, despite the bullets in your teeth and the barbed wire in your hearts, the three of you aren’t always pure fire and brimstone. sure, you ain’t exactly sugar and honey, either, but there’s something human-adjacent somewhere at the base of your skulls. you can read this pretty easily on maxwell. she’s a sly little grackle of a woman, but she doesn’t put any extra effort into hiding the flickering of her lovely monster heart.

jacobi, for a reason you have yet to decode, is not that easily read.

he reminds you of those late-night nature documentaries, the ones where the cameraman sits idly by in silent, dutiful observation while a wild dog takes down a particularly willful antelope. not the prey — he doesn’t remind you of the prey one bit. his category of vulnerability is of an entirely different breed. he reminds you of the wild dog, the carnivore, that quiet sort of desperation which drives a thing to kill.

(are you the cameraman, culpeo? what are you to him, exactly?)

but always, always, to watch him sleep from a respectable distance, standing just behind the red rope, is a lovely thing. when he’s awake, he’s got that look in his eye, the one that says he’s about a half second away from either killing you slowly with his bare hands or dropping to your feet like you’re an altar to be worshipped at, at any given moment of any given day. and don’t lie to yourself, you’ve got a god complex big enough to taste copper-sweet victory every time he gives you that look, but it sure as hell masks whatever’s going on behind his eyes pretty damn well.

when he sleeps, you see a human again, not just some handcrafted beast to do your bidding. just a man with steady breaths and a humming pulse and not the slightest capacity to defend himself against a slit throat. it’s sweet, almost. he falls asleep so easily in your presence. it’s almost as if he’s make the terrible mistake of _trusting_ you. you suspect he doesn’t, of course — he doesn’t trust a damn man in the world, himself included, which is common in your line of work — but it’s possible that you’ve rejected your own humanity just enough to earn that trust right back.

seeing him passed out in the motel bed beside yours, exhausted after a long mission, while maxwell sits beside him, tapping out some python files on her laptop — it’s certainly something.

to have him fall asleep in your arms is a different story entirely.

the air is warm, so warm, but your skin is still clammy and pallored, and jacobi is even warmer than the air, so you wrap your arms just a little tighter around him, feel the weight of his head on your chest like an offering, and think about how oh-so-dizzy you feel, without just the bloodloss to blame anymore.

the stab to your shoulder still hurts like a bitch, but the stitches are nicely done, even for your tip-top standards for jacobi’s work. he should’ve probably put some gauze over them after he finished sewing, but you — hmm — in his defense, you did definitely distract him a little bit there. just a smidge. (you wonder absently if his nails left marks on the back of your neck, or if your fingers stained his skin with bruises wherever they traveled.)

you are not a man who often sleeps more than you need to, but you’ll be damned if you aren’t very, very tired. you need to get back to your place, soon as you can, maybe clean yourself up a bit before resting your eyes for as long as you can manage to keep them closed after a night like this. you need a shower and a meal and a decent night’s sleep for tomorrow morning, when you’ll inevitably have to tie up all the little loose ends of the mission that you just almost fucked up entirely by getting stabbed three quarters of the way through it.

you’d be lying pretty damn brazenly if you said that no piece of you wants to stay.

having him so close is… nice.

(you feel an intense desire to drag your fingers through his hair, to stay there with him asleep on your chest, to wake him up and whisper hush-hush secrets into his ears until he tells you to stay again, to stay forever.)

but you _can’t_ stay.

you — you can’t.

you move your arms — one beneath his knees, the other under his back — and lift him up off the ground. your bad shoulder strains from the movement, but you’ve never been a weak man, not in the least, even if you are about two pounds light on blood volume at this particular moment in time.

you set him down on his bed, gentle as you can, and rest the back of your palm on his cheek for a moment, leaving little flakes of dried blood in its wake when you eventually pull it away.

there is peace in every motion of his ribcage and entropy in every twitch of his fingers. it’s a stunning thing to watch. he’s fascination incarnate.

you heard once that when humans started describing colors, almost every society in existence started with only two terms: one for the cold-dark-black, and one for the warm-bright-white. for the longest time, those two names were all they could’ve ever needed to describe the world around them.

and then they chose a third name, a name for flame and blood, and that name was red.

you look at your bloodsoaked firecracker boy and start to understand why.

he — he has a shower here, right? obviously. and you do have to shower anyways. there’s no harm in staying, just a little longer, to take a shower. sure. that sounds like a good enough excuse.

you take a seat on his couch to pull off your shoes and socks, sparing a glance at your long-abandoned shirt crumpled in a pile near his front door. shame, really. that was a _very_ expensive shirt. now you need a new one.

a trip to jacobi’s dresser grants you with an old tee of his, soft and faded from wear, and — after a brief moment of contemplation — a pair of torn jeans, which look like they might actually fit you something decent. they’ll be miles better than the dress pants you have on, which are currently so slicked with blood you can see it even in the pitch black of the fabric.

his bathroom is neat. too neat. unpleasantly organized, compared to the rest of his place, compared to the chaos of his mind. you consider raiding his medicine cabinet, but you’ve had plenty of painkillers tonight, and a liquor cabinet would be much more worth your time — and much more revealing. plus, it’s not like you don’t already know his prescriptions.

you strip off the rest of your clothes and step under the stream of dead cold water. it’s startling and painful and a welcome relief from the heat in the air that’s slowly creeping back into your skin.

there’s little more inherently joyful than watching blood pour down a shower drain. it really is a _lovely_ thing. you keep your body angled to stop your shoulder from getting the brunt of the jet of water, but there’s more than enough pooled across the rest of your skin to more than make up for it, coating the polished white shower basin with a quarter inch of stark, shimmery crimson.

you step out, dry yourself off, and and change into his clothes. you decide, rather immediately, that you won’t be returning them. they’re yours now. he can’t have them back.

but the image in the mirror is still ever so slightly unsettling. you don’t look nearly as threatening in his shirt. and you’re quite damn fond of looking threatening. it’s practically in your job description, which is, in essence: 1) do as goddard says. 2) look scary as hell doin’ it. and you’re always good at your job. until about eight seconds ago, apparently. now you just look like some lovestruck nobody who stole a hoodie from his —

you spare a glance back over at daniel, still sleeping semi-soundly, hands tense and white-knuckled, and your lungs burn like they’re filling with seawater. you would not consider yourself to be a man capable of feeling anything even vaguely reminiscent of affection. he makes you question that. he makes you question that a _lot._ you hate him for it. (he is so beautiful.)

you swipe his phone from his pocket and open it. you don’t even have to put in the passcode — your thumbprint still unlocks the damn thing, from the last time you broke into it and changed the settings. that was months ago. he hasn’t noticed, or, more likely, doesn’t care. either way, he’s earned himself a lecture on the dangers of being an idiot who lets random people steal his personal information.

it is 2:53 am. he has three thousand, two hundred and twenty-four unread emails. his wallpaper is a photo of maxwell, crouching on the street with a fish taco, surrounded by stray cats. his passcode, assuming he hasn’t changed it, is the day he met you. his camera roll contains a small album full of photos of you, all the ones he thinks you don’t know about, all the ones you have the grace to allow him to take when he thinks you aren’t looking. he’s — _too attached._ that’ll be a problem down the line. but it’s a problem for another day.

you pull up the clock app and shut off his 6:00 am alarm, before locking the phone and setting it on his bedside table.

his hands twitch slightly at the noise, and his breathing shifts. you might have woken him up. that, or he’s having one of his patented nightmares.

 _go back to sleep,_ you consider saying, but you don’t say that, don’t say anything, just lean down over him and run your fingers through the soft tangles of hair behind his ear and hold your hand against his until he relaxes slightly and breathes more smoothly and you’re entirely, mostly, relatively certain he’s back to a fully sleeping state.

you press a kiss against his knuckles and leave the room before you’ve even processed what you’ve just done.

his kitchen has several drawers, most of which you rummaged through in a not-so-sound emotional state when you wandered in here earlier. there are eight pens in the furthest right drawer of the island. you grab the only one that seems like it might actually work, take the least important-looking sheet from his stack of unfinished paperwork, and tear it into four.

> _Don’t expect sleeping in to be a regular occurrence_
> 
> _And stop depriving yourself of sleep_
> 
> ~~_It’s not hea_ ~~ _It detriments the team as a whole_
> 
> _Take the day off and finish your paperwork_
> 
> _— W_

(this, you set onto his bedside table, on top of his phone.) 

> _Sorry for the mess_
> 
> _Not cleaning it up_
> 
> _— W  
>  _

(this one goes into the puddle of rapidly drying gore on his living room floor. the corners of the paper quickly soak up some of the red, bleeding a bit of the ink.)

> _You owe me a new dress shirt_
> 
> _Unfortunately, I also don’t trust you to shop for one_
> 
> _Your tee will be held as ransom until further notice_
> 
> _— W  
>  _

(this is placed within his second dresser drawer, where you snagged the shirt from.)

> ~~_Daniel_~~ _Mr. Jacobi,_
> 
> ~~_You are every_ _t_  ~~  ~~ _You are_~~   _I ~~think that I~~_ _You’d make an acceptable medic_
> 
> ~~_Thank you_  ~~  _ ~~Thanks~~_ ~~_I l_~~ _Good work_ ~~ _as always_~~
> 
> ~~_I will always stay_  ~~  _I ~~wanted to stay~~_   _I ~~should st~~   _See you tomorrow

(this one is crumpled up and placed into the pocket of his — your — jeans. you have a feeling that you’ll forget about its existence by sunrise. you have a second, opposing feeling that you will never, ever forget about it.)

you take one last hesitant pause at the front door of his apartment and almost can’t convince yourself to leave. but you’re a _very_ convincing man. you run your fingers across the broken chain lock, drag your nails against the smear of blood along the wall beside the door, and leave without waking him.

\---

**Author's Note:**

> y'all are absolute angels and your comments and kudos keep me going. thank you so much for all the love and support!


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